The Other Side of Silence by André Brink Read Free Book Online

and who has been fucking and vomiting his way
through the labyrinthine afternoon.
    This time, as if mesmerised, Katja does obey.
    “That’s a good girl,” approves von Blixen. He stretches both
arms out, stiffly, with fierce concentration, and places them on
her breasts. The girl goes red in me face, but she appears too
scared to move.
    “Blood,” he says, and spits on the floor. “All these miserable
women, bleeding, it’s like a bloody slaughterhouse. But you are too
young for that, I’m sure. It’s you I want.”
    He slides one hand down the front of her body and cups it over
her pubis, grunting with satisfaction.
    Several things happen at the same time. The girl jerks away from
his grasp, loses her balance against the edge of the bed and falls
on her back, her legs kicking briefly. “I am bleeding,” she
screams at him. “I’m bleeding like all the others.”
    Hanna X removes the kappie from her head to expose her face.
    And right then Frau Knesebeck speaks from the doorway, “Herr
Oberst.”
    Colonel von Blixen reacts as if he has been struck by a snake.
What ultimately shatters him – the girl’s taunt, Hanna X’s face, or
Frau Knesebeck’s appearance – they will never know. But without a
word the military man draws himself up, squares his shoulders, and
marches out. They hear him all the way down the great staircase.
The front door slams. Outside there are sounds of men and horses.
Hooves trotting off, growing ever fainter in the distance. The
interminable silence of the desert reimposes itself.
    “Make yourself proper,” Frau Knesebeck curtly tells the
girl.
    Katja gets up and straightens the dress which has rucked up in
her fall. Hanna X puts on her kappie again. The mistress of
Frauenstein leaves, closing the door behind her with a firm, quiet
click.
    It is only several hours later, after night has fallen and the
girl has gone back to her own room, that the colonel returns,
unaccompanied, shaking in a silent inner rage that will not subside
before he has vented everything that has been building up for so
long.
    Frauenstein is quiet. The dark has restored, a curious bitter
innocence to the place. The sad innocence of an orphanage when all
the ordinary diurnal sounds have drained from it.

∨ The Other Side of Silence ∧
Nine
    S ounds do not
disappear, not ever, not really. Hanna knows this even when she is
very small. What happens when they appear to fade away, like the
sounds of the bell from the square, particularly at night, is that
they grow very small in order to fit into a hiding place where they
cannot readily be found by those who do not know how to listen. A
small round place like a shell. This is what she discovers on the
narrow grey beach of the Weser opposite the Europahafen one day
when the girls of the Little Children of Jesus are taken on an
outing by Frau Agathe. The day is gloomy and cold, but the river
entrances her. Not for itself but because she knows it runs to the
sea, which she has never seen, except in her dreams. And perhaps in
her lost life before she was left at the orphanage, a life of which
she remembers only brief unconnected flashes – one of which is of
the sea, its sounds and smells, its white waves breaking. The sea
is a place of miracles and magic. It goes all the way from
Bremerhaven to the other side of the world, where the wind comes
from, and where the palm trees of the Children’s Bible grow
and camels come by and the sun always shines. It is not cold and
grey like here beside the Weser in Bremen, but an endless warmth.
One can be naked in it and feel the sun on one’s body, it turns you
golden brown all over. Here in the orphanage, to be naked is very
bad. There is the little girl, Helga, who is new and stays in bed
all day crying, so Hanna crawls in beside her and they take off
their shifts to be closer together, and Helga’s sadness disappears
and her own as well, but then Frau Agathe finds them together and
it turns out that their badness is so